Rob Sheldon: Origin of life as an information-concentrating event

Reflecting on recent coverage here of the origin of life problem (see, for example, “Researcher suggests molecules like Alzheimer plaques may have powered early life” and “Why ‘Alzheimer world’ won’t work”), physicist Rob Sheldon offers a different approach for discussion,

The OOL problem lies on the intersection of metaphysics and physics/chemistry/biology. The answers people give to the problem have to be evaluated both metaphysically and physically, preferably independently. Most of the time, the physics (or chemistry, etc) is a mess, because the real question they are addressing is metaphysical. So rather than make fun of their pitiful physics, perhaps we should be asking how well they are doing metaphysically?

My intention is wading into this debate, is to review OOL like an ice-dancing judge, and separate the technical part of the program from the artistic part. At least then we can separate the accomplishments from the schmaltzy choreography.

1) How it happened?

If we stay away from the 1:10^6000 odds, if we avoid invoking miracles, then we can actually begin to make progress on this question. To begin with, we know a lot of ways that it could not happen. That is not an insignificant accomplishment, as Thomas Edison once remarked about the light bulb. But by-and-large, this is the metaphysical “first question”, this is the aesthetic part of the ice dancing competition. The Darwinist wants chance, the ID wants design, and there is an inconsistent continuum between these two poles–e.g. Paul Davies who thinks that Nature has a built in design that operates by chance, or TE who think that God has a built in chance that operates by design.

My claim, and it is certainly supported by good physics, is that OOL was an information concentrating event, when two subsystems that were highly designed but not yet autonomous, were combined to make an autonomous system. It’s the way we make automobiles, watches, jet airplanes, etc. It is the way a designer works. Note that this “divide and conquer” approach doesn’t help the Darwinist with chance, any more than the probability of rolling 10 snake eyes is made any more probable by rolling five die twice.

===============================================

OOL was an information concentrating event, when two subsystems that were highly designed but not yet autonomous, were combined to make an autonomous system. It’s the way we make automobiles, watches, jet airplanes, etc. It is the way a designer works.

===============================================

Nor is this is an answer to #2 below, because this answer is in generalizations, principles, laws of designers, whereas #2 is asking for a particular pathway. But ID should be able to come up with a raft of designer-based principles: designers work with pre-existing solutions; designers reuse designs; designs are optimized for overall functionality, not local maxima; designers have aesthetic sense along with good engineering; designers plan for the future; designers sometimes sign their work.

All of this should go into an ID OOL model–not just my pitiful first principle of “adding subsystems together.”

2) How could it possibly have happened?

I do not use this phrasing as license, as if “possible” includes things that are 1:10^1000 probable. Yeah, I know how philosophers use this word “possible”, but that would turn the question back into metaphysics. This is the technical part of the ice dancing and I want to evaluate it with technical tools. So for me, “possible” means “greater than 1 part in 10^50” or something of that kind. More rigorously, I’d want to prove “greater than 1 part in 2”, but I’m afraid through ignorance I might miss the right answer, so I’ll include a lot of unlikely stuff as well.

Then going back to the metaphysics of #1, the question becomes “how can we add two subsystems together so as to probably achieve higher functionality” ? Now of course, we humans use our hands, sometimes robots, often with tools to accomplish this. But before humans had hands, what would a designer use? What kind of tools can we see at work in the universe? Darwinians are fond of warm ponds, tidal action, strong sunlight and meteoritic impacts. None of these are particularly well suited for say, assembling a 747. But if you wanted to assemble a cell, what kind of tools would you use?

Freezers, microscopes, micro-manipulators, petri-dishes. Would you use autoclaves, telescopes, blow-torches? Probably not. Why? Because they do more damage then help. Therefore none of the “warm pond” contingent is apparently interested in constructing a cell from subsystems, since they keep insisting on a lab bench filled with cell-destroying tools.

So I look around the universe for small, isolatable communities that like a Petri dish, could supply a single subsystem in its pure state. It has to be cold, lest heat and entropy destroy the material while I’m doing the operation. It has to be mobile, so I can get it from the freezer when I need it. It has to be “mixable” so that I can combine two Petri dishes.

===============================================

#3 How can this fit in a Darwinist/religious paradigm?

It can’t, but then I argue that none of 21st century biology fits in a Darwinist paradigm.

===============================================

Each of those criteria can be turned into a mathematical expression–say, by replacing “subsystems” with “entropy gradients” and converting to a fluid expression. Then we can write “information” as a mathematical “invariant” that needs to be conserved by the fluid, and the goal is to combine two streams of information into a more concentrated stream.

This has been my approach to finding a “possible” way to create OOL. It is both consistent with my metaphysics (design) and with my physics (fluid description of information).

#3 How can this fit in a Darwinist/religious paradigm?

It can’t, but then I argue that none of 21st century biology fits in a Darwinist paradigm. That’s because Darwinists are always talking about “apparent purpose” even if they think it is an illusion. So this approach to OOL fits perfectly with the way biochemistry is “elucidating pathways” even though biologists will claim its simply “an apparent path that nobody made”. Once we get past the kowtow to Darwin, all of modern biology is purpose-driven. Therefore, my research paradigm for exploring OOL is perfectly within the bounds of biology, if not chemistry and physics.

So what exactly are the objections to “panspermia”?

The Darwinists hate it for the very same reason that they hated Lamarck–it is a direct competitor to Darwin’s theory. After all, if various fossils show change because they were later arrivals, then there is no reason to believe in evolution at all! Furthermore, if Earth is the source of all our data, then it seems irresponsible, nay, cheating to outsource the data to an unknown and unknowable location.

The Christian response has been rather less nuanced, though equally vigorous. Bruno was burned at the stake for his many heresies, but rather high on the list was his view that there were an infinite number of worlds with intelligent life on them. (Obviously, an early multiverse proponent.) Why this one idea should be labelled a heresy, I do not know, since neither the Vatican astronomer nor the patriarch of Moscow, when asked this question by Hoover, said that it was a heresy. I’ve even put in four years at a Protestant seminary and I have yet to find any reference to this as heresy. So if none of the Orthodox faiths find this heretical, why is it so often ridiculed as if it were?

Having no metaphysical reason to desist from the research program, I continue to work on it, not least because it involves teleology, coherence, differential geometry, non-equilibrium statistical mechanics, cosmology, fluid dynamics, and “first things”. It is at the cutting edge of so many different fields of physics that I feel like Columbus, planting my feet on a totally new world which holds promise of new mountains and valleys, of El Dorado and the Eternal Fountain, but which may turn out to be simply an island.

For clearly explained background on problems with current origin of life models, see: The Science Fictions series at your fingertips (origin of life)

Quote from preceding video:
“The theoretical (information) density of DNA is you could store the total world information, which is 1.8 zetabytes, at least in 2011, in about 4 grams of DNA.”
Sriram Kosuri PhD. – Wyss Institute

Storing information in DNA – Test-tube data – Jan 26th 2013
Excerpt: Dr Goldman’s new scheme is significant in several ways. He and his team have managed to set a record (739.3 kilobytes) for the amount of unique information encoded. But it has been designed to do far more than that. It should, think the researchers, be easily capable of swallowing the roughly 3 zettabytes (a zettabyte is one billion trillion or 10²¹ bytes) of digital data thought presently to exist in the world and still have room for plenty more.http://www.economist.com/news/.....d-magnetic

Even the simplest life on earth, the parasitic Mycoplasma genitalium, is found to be far more complex that any machine man has ever made:

Three Subsets of Sequence Complexity and Their Relevance to Biopolymeric Information – David L. Abel and Jack T. Trevors – Theoretical Biology & Medical Modelling, Vol. 2, 11 August 2005, page 8
“No man-made program comes close to the technical brilliance of even Mycoplasmal genetic algorithms. Mycoplasmas are the simplest known organism with the smallest known genome, to date. How was its genome and other living organisms’ genomes programmed?”http://www.biomedcentral.com/c.....2-2-29.pdf

Simplest Microbes More Complex than Thought – Dec. 2009
Excerpt: PhysOrg reported that a species of Mycoplasma,, “The bacteria appeared to be assembled in a far more complex way than had been thought.” Many molecules were found to have multiple functions: for instance, some enzymes could catalyze unrelated reactions, and some proteins were involved in multiple protein complexes.”http://www.creationsafaris.com.....#20091229a

To Model the Simplest Microbe in the World, You Need 128 Computers – July 2012
Excerpt: Mycoplasma genitalium has one of the smallest genomes of any free-living organism in the world, clocking in at a mere 525 genes. That’s a fraction of the size of even another bacterium like E. coli, which has 4,288 genes.,,,
The bioengineers, led by Stanford’s Markus Covert, succeeded in modeling the bacterium, and published their work last week in the journal Cell. What’s fascinating is how much horsepower they needed to partially simulate this simple organism. It took a cluster of 128 computers running for 9 to 10 hours to actually generate the data on the 25 categories of molecules that are involved in the cell’s lifecycle processes.,,,
,,the depth and breadth of cellular complexity has turned out to be nearly unbelievable, and difficult to manage, even given Moore’s Law. The M. genitalium model required 28 subsystems to be individually modeled and integrated, and many critics of the work have been complaining on Twitter that’s only a fraction of what will eventually be required to consider the simulation realistic.,,,http://www.theatlantic.com/tec.....rs/260198/

Moreover, when working from the thermodynamic perspective,,,

“Is there a real connection between entropy in physics and the entropy of information? ….The equations of information theory and the second law are the same, suggesting that the idea of entropy is something fundamental…” Siegfried, Dallas Morning News, 5/14/90, [Quotes Robert W. Lucky, Ex. Director of Research, AT&T, Bell Laboratories & John A. Wheeler, of Princeton & Univ. of TX, Austin]

the information content that is found in a cell when working from the thermodynamic perspective, the ‘information concentration’ found in simple cells explodes over even the gargantuan amount that was found for the capacity of DNA to store information:

Moleular Biophysics – Information theory. Relation between information and entropy: – Setlow-Pollard, Ed. Addison Wesley
Excerpt: Linschitz gave the figure 9.3 x 10^12 cal/deg or 9.3 x 10^12 x 4.2 joules/deg for the entropy of a bacterial cell. Using the relation H = S/(k In 2), we find that the information content is 4 x 10^12 bits. Morowitz’ deduction from the work of Bayne-Jones and Rhees gives the lower value of 5.6 x 10^11 bits, which is still in the neighborhood of 10^12 bits. Thus two quite different approaches give rather concordant figures.http://www.astroscu.unam.mx/~a.....ecular.htm

“a one-celled bacterium, e. coli, is estimated to contain the equivalent of 100 million pages of Encyclopedia Britannica. Expressed in information in science jargon, this would be the same as 10^12 bits of information. In comparison, the total writings from classical Greek Civilization is only 10^9 bits, and the largest libraries in the world – The British Museum, Oxford Bodleian Library, New York Public Library, Harvard Widenier Library, and the Moscow Lenin Library – have about 10 million volumes or 10^12 bits.” – R. C. Wysonghttp://books.google.com/books?.....;lpg=PA112

‘The information content of a simple cell has been estimated as around 10^12 bits, comparable to about a hundred million pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica.”
Carl Sagan, “Life” in Encyclopedia Britannica: Macropaedia (1974 ed.), pp. 893-894

A direct connection between entropy and information was finally established here:

Demonic device converts information to energy – 2010
Excerpt: “This is a beautiful experimental demonstration that information has a thermodynamic content,” says Christopher Jarzynski, a statistical chemist at the University of Maryland in College Park. In 1997, Jarzynski formulated an equation to define the amount of energy that could theoretically be converted from a unit of information2; the work by Sano and his team has now confirmed this equation. “This tells us something new about how the laws of thermodynamics work on the microscopic scale,” says Jarzynski.http://www.scientificamerican......rts-inform

Finding a direct connection between information and entropy in the cell is, to put it mildly, extremely problematic for Darwinists since,,

“Bertalanffy (1968) called the relation between irreversible thermodynamics and information theory one of the most fundamental unsolved problems in biology.”
Charles J. Smith – Biosystems, Vol.1, p259.

“Gain in entropy always means loss of information, and nothing more.”
Gilbert Newton Lewis – highly influential Chemist of the first half of last century

In the following paper, Andy C. McIntosh, Professor of Thermodynamics at the University of Leeds, argues that information is its own independent entity, separate from matter and energy, which ‘constrains the local thermodynamics (of a cell) to be in a non-equilibrium state’,,,

Information and Thermodynamics in Living Systems – Andy C. McIntosh – May 2013
Excerpt: The third view then that we have proposed in this paper is the top down approach. In this paradigm, the information is non-material and constrains the local thermodynamics to be in a non-equilibrium state of raised free energy. It is the information which is the active ingredient, and the matter and energy are passive to the laws of thermodynamics within the system.
As a consequence of this approach, we have developed in this paper some suggested principles of information exchange which have some parallels with the laws of thermodynamics which undergird this approach.,,,http://www.worldscientific.com.....08728_0008

Professor McIntosh’s contention that information is its own unique, and independent, entity, and that the matter and energy of a cell are passive to it, has much empirical evidence going it. First, it is important to note that ‘non-local’, beyond space and time, quantum entanglement can be used as a ‘quantum information channel’,,,

Quantum Entanglement and Information
Quantum entanglement is a physical resource, like energy, associated with the peculiar nonclassical correlations that are possible between separated quantum systems. Entanglement can be measured, transformed, and purified. A pair of quantum systems in an entangled state can be used as a quantum information channel to perform computational and cryptographic tasks that are impossible for classical systems. The general study of the information-processing capabilities of quantum systems is the subject of quantum information theory.http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-entangle/

In fact, using this ‘non-local’, beyond space and time, ‘quantum information channel’ of entanglement, both matter and energy are found to ‘passively’ reduce to quantum information. In fact, an entire human can ‘theoretically’ be reduced to quantum information and teleported to another location in the universe:

Moreover, this ‘spooky’ non-local quantum information, though at first thought to be impossible to maintain in ‘hot and noisy’ cells, is now found in molecular biology on a massive scale,

Quantum entanglement in hot systems – 2011
Excerpt: The authors remark that this reverses the previous orthodoxy, which held that quantum effects could not exist in biological systems because of the amount of noise in these systems.,,, Environmental noise here drives a persistent and cyclic generation of new entanglement.,,, In summary, the authors say that they have demonstrated that entanglement can recur even in a hot noisy environment. In biological systems this can be related to changes in the conformation of macromolecules.http://quantum-mind.co.uk/quan.....t-systems/

In fact, in a finding I’m sure Professor Andy McIntosh would be extremely pleased with, this ‘spooky’ non-local quantum information is now found to be ‘holding life together’:

Quantum entanglement holds together life’s blueprint – 2010
Excerpt: When the researchers analysed the DNA without its helical structure, they found that the electron clouds were not entangled. But when they incorporated DNA’s helical structure into the model, they saw that the electron clouds of each base pair became entangled with those of its neighbours. “If you didn’t have entanglement, then DNA would have a simple flat structure, and you would never get the twist that seems to be important to the functioning of DNA,” says team member Vlatko Vedral of the University of Oxford.http://neshealthblog.wordpress.....blueprint/

DNA Can Discern Between Two Quantum States, Research Shows – June 2011
Excerpt: — DNA — can discern between quantum states known as spin. – The researchers fabricated self-assembling, single layers of DNA attached to a gold substrate. They then exposed the DNA to mixed groups of electrons with both directions of spin. Indeed, the team’s results surpassed expectations: The biological molecules reacted strongly with the electrons carrying one of those spins, and hardly at all with the others. The longer the molecule, the more efficient it was at choosing electrons with the desired spin, while single strands and damaged bits of DNA did not exhibit this property.http://www.sciencedaily.com/re.....104014.htm

Does DNA Have Telepathic Properties?-A Galaxy Insight – 2009
Excerpt: DNA has been found to have a bizarre ability to put itself together, even at a distance, when according to known science it shouldn’t be able to.,,, The recognition of similar sequences in DNA’s chemical subunits, occurs in a way unrecognized by science. There is no known reason why the DNA is able to combine the way it does, and from a current theoretical standpoint this feat should be chemically impossible.http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_.....ave-t.html

As well, besides DNA, it turns out that quantum information has been confirmed to be in protein structures as well;

Coherent Intrachain energy migration at room temperature – Elisabetta Collini and Gregory Scholes – University of Toronto – Science, 323, (2009), pp. 369-73
Excerpt: The authors conducted an experiment to observe quantum coherence dynamics in relation to energy transfer. The experiment, conducted at room temperature, examined chain conformations, such as those found in the proteins of living cells. Neighbouring molecules along the backbone of a protein chain were seen to have coherent energy transfer. Where this happens quantum decoherence (the underlying tendency to loss of coherence due to interaction with the environment) is able to be resisted, and the evolution of the system remains entangled as a single quantum state.http://www.scimednet.org/quant.....d-protein/

Physicists Discover Quantum Law of Protein Folding – February 22, 2011
Quantum mechanics finally explains why protein folding depends on temperature in such a strange way.
Excerpt: First, a little background on protein folding. Proteins are long chains of amino acids that become biologically active only when they fold into specific, highly complex shapes. The puzzle is how proteins do this so quickly when they have so many possible configurations to choose from.
To put this in perspective, a relatively small protein of only 100 amino acids can take some 10^100 different configurations. If it tried these shapes at the rate of 100 billion a second, it would take longer than the age of the universe to find the correct one. Just how these molecules do the job in nanoseconds, nobody knows.,,,
Their astonishing result is that this quantum transition model fits the folding curves of 15 different proteins and even explains the difference in folding and unfolding rates of the same proteins.
That’s a significant breakthrough. Luo and Lo’s equations amount to the first universal laws of protein folding. That’s the equivalent in biology to something like the thermodynamic laws in physics.http://www.technologyreview.co.....f-protein/

Quantum no-hiding theorem experimentally confirmed for first time
Excerpt: In the classical world, information can be copied and deleted at will. In the quantum world, however, the conservation of quantum information means that information cannot be created nor destroyed. This concept stems from two fundamental theorems of quantum mechanics: the no-cloning theorem and the no-deleting theorem. A third and related theorem, called the no-hiding theorem, addresses information loss in the quantum world. According to the no-hiding theorem, if information is missing from one system (which may happen when the system interacts with the environment), then the information is simply residing somewhere else in the Universe; in other words, the missing information cannot be hidden in the correlations between a system and its environment.
– per Physorg

Quantum no-deleting theorem
Excerpt: A stronger version of the no-cloning theorem and the no-deleting theorem provide permanence to quantum information. To create a copy one must import the information from some part of the universe and to delete a state one needs to export it to another part of the universe where it will continue to exist.
– per wikipedia

That classical information is a subset of quantum information is noted here,

Quantum knowledge cools computers: New understanding of entropy – June 2011
Excerpt: No heat, even a cooling effect;
In the case of perfect classical knowledge of a computer memory (zero entropy), deletion of the data requires in theory no energy at all. The researchers prove that “more than complete knowledge” from quantum entanglement with the memory (negative entropy) leads to deletion of the data being accompanied by removal of heat from the computer and its release as usable energy. This is the physical meaning of negative entropy. Renner emphasizes, however, “This doesn’t mean that we can develop a perpetual motion machine.” The data can only be deleted once, so there is no possibility to continue to generate energy. The process also destroys the entanglement, and it would take an input of energy to reset the system to its starting state. The equations are consistent with what’s known as the second law of thermodynamics: the idea that the entropy of the universe can never decrease. Vedral says “We’re working on the edge of the second law. If you go any further, you will break it.”http://www.sciencedaily.com/re.....134300.htm

Moreover, besides Quantum Information being found to be dominant of matter and energy, and to be ‘holding life together, (and to be performing some type of highly sophisticated quantum computation within DNA and proteins), it is found that there is another level of information transfer in cells that is above the ‘simple’ molecular information transfer that Darwinists rely on. First, it was found that cells use electromagnetic radiation (light) to communicate between each other,

Cellular Communication through Light
Excerpt: Information transfer is a life principle. On a cellular level we generally assume that molecules are carriers of information, yet there is evidence for non-molecular information transfer due to endogenous coherent light. This light is ultra-weak, is emitted by many organisms, including humans and is conventionally described as biophoton emission.http://www.plosone.org/article.....ne.0005086

Paramecium caudatum can communicate with neighbors using a non-molecular method, probably photons. The cell populations were separated either with glass allowing photon transmission from 340 nm to longer waves, or quartz being transmittable from 150 nm, i.e. from UVlight to longer waves. Energy uptake, cell division rate and growth correlation were influenced.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paramecium_caudatum

Evolutionists Self-Destructing: Now They Are Saying Evolution Created a Fine-Tuned Electro Magnetic Communications System Which We Can’t Even Detect – Cornelius Hunter – June 2012
Excerpt: And this electromagnetic communication system is so sophisticated we can’t even figure it out. We don’t know how the information is generated or how the photons are transmitted or received. Even just detecting the tiny energy fluctuations is incredibly difficult.
per Darwin’s God

Biophoton Communication: Can Cells Talk Using Light? – May 2012
Excerpt: Biophoton streams consist of short quasiperiodic bursts, which he says are remarkably similar to those used to send binary data over a noisy channel. That might help explain how cells can detect such low levels of radiation in a noisy environment.http://www.technologyreview.co.....alk-using/

Moreover, besides cells communicating between each other using electromagnetic radiation (light), it is now found that there is a virtual symphony of light happening within cells between proteins and DNA,

Symphony of Life, Revealed: New Imaging Technique Captures Vibrations of Proteins, Tiny Motions Critical to Human Life – Jan. 16, 2014
Excerpt: To observe the protein vibrations, Markelz’ team relied on an interesting characteristic of proteins: The fact that they vibrate at the same frequency as the light they absorb.
This is analogous to the way wine glasses tremble and shatter when a singer hits exactly the right note. Markelz explained: Wine glasses vibrate because they are absorbing the energy of sound waves, and the shape of a glass determines what pitches of sound it can absorb. Similarly, proteins with different structures will absorb and vibrate in response to light of different frequencies.
So, to study vibrations in lysozyme, Markelz and her colleagues exposed a sample to light of different frequencies and polarizations, and measured the types of light the protein absorbed.
This technique, , allowed the team to identify which sections of the protein vibrated under normal biological conditions. The researchers were also able to see that the vibrations endured over time, challenging existing assumptions.
“If you tap on a bell, it rings for some time, and with a sound that is specific to the bell. This is how the proteins behave,” Markelz said. “Many scientists have previously thought a protein is more like a wet sponge than a bell: If you tap on a wet sponge, you don’t get any sustained sound.”http://www.sciencedaily.com/re.....084838.htm

The mechanism and properties of bio-photon emission and absorption in protein molecules in living systems – May 2012
Excerpt: From the energy spectra, it was determined that the protein molecules could both radiate and absorb bio-photons with wavelengths of less than 3??m and 5–7??m, consistent with the energy level transitions of the excitons.,,,http://jap.aip.org/resource/1/.....horized=no

Are humans really beings of light?
Excerpt: A particularly gifted student talked him into another experiment.,,, He also found that DNA could send out a wide range of frequencies, some of which seemed to be linked to certain functions. If DNA stored this light, it would naturally emit more light on being unzipped. These and other studies proved to Popp that one of the most essential sources of light and biophoton emissions was DNA.http://viewzone2.com/dna.html

Bioactive peptide design using the Resonant Recognition Model – 2007
Excerpt: There is evidence that proteins and DNA have certain conducting properties [12]. If so, then charges would be moving through the backbone of the macromolecule and passing through different energy stages caused by the different side groups of various amino acids or nucleotides. This process provides sufficient conditions for the emission of electromagnetic waves.http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm.....MC1997124/

The Real Bioinformatics Revolution – Proteins and Nucleic Acids ‘Singing’ to One Another?
Excerpt: the molecules send out specific frequencies of electromagnetic waves which not only enable them to ‘see’ and ‘hear’ each other, as both photon and phonon modes exist for electromagnetic waves, but also to influence each other at a distance and become ineluctably drawn to each other if vibrating out of phase (in a complementary way).,,, More than 1,000 proteins from over 30 functional groups have been analysed. Remarkably, the results showed that proteins with the same biological function share a single frequency peak while there is no significant peak in common for proteins with different functions; furthermore the characteristic peak frequency differs for different biological functions.,,, The same results were obtained when regulatory DNA sequences were analysed.http://www.i-sis.org.uk/TheRea.....lution.php

Photons and Phonons
Excerpt: You see, the primary Planck-Law (E=hf) is metaphysical and independent on the inertia distribution of the solid states.,,,
Both, photon and phonon carry massequivalent energy m=E/c2=hf/c2.
The matter-light interaction so is rendered electromagnetically noninertial for the photon and becomes acoustically inertial for the phonons; both however subject to Bose-Einstein stochastic wave mechanics incorporative the Planck-Law.,,
Where, how and why does E=hf correctly and experimentally verifiably describe the quantum mechanics of energy propagation?,,,http://www.tonyb.freeyellow.com/id135.html

Phonon
Excerpt: In physics, a phonon,, represents an excited state in the quantum mechanical quantization of the modes of vibrations,,
The name phonon,, translates as sound or voice because long-wavelength phonons give rise to sound.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonon

As to both the photon and phonon modes for electromagnetic communication existing within the cell, it is interesting to note that there is a deep connection between sound (phonons) and 3-dimensional structure:

This connection between 3-D structure and sound is interesting to know since the 3-Dimensional structure of body plans is not reducible to the linear sequence of digital information on the DNA, such as what Darwinists presuppose:

Not Junk After All—Conclusion – August 29, 2013
Excerpt: Many scientists have pointed out that the relationship between the genome and the organism — the genotype-phenotype mapping — cannot be reduced to a genetic program encoded in DNA sequences. Atlan and Koppel wrote in 1990 that advances in artificial intelligence showed that cellular operations are not controlled by a linear sequence of instructions in DNA but by a “distributed multilayer network” [150]. According to Denton and his co-workers, protein folding appears to involve formal causes that transcend material mechanisms [151], and according to Sternberg this is even more evident at higher levels of the genotype-phenotype mapping [152].http://www.uncommondescent.com.....onclusion/

The Types: A Persistent Structuralist Challenge to Darwinian Pan-Selectionism – Michael J. Denton – 2013
Excerpt: Cell form ,,,Karsenti comments that despite the attraction of the (genetic) blueprint model there are no “simple linear chains of causal events that link genes to phenotypes” [77: p. 255]. And wherever there is no simple linear causal chain linking genes with phenotypes,,,—at any level in the organic hierarchy, from cells to body plans—the resulting form is bound to be to a degree epigenetic and emergent, and cannot be inferred from even the most exhaustive analysis of the genes.,,,
To this author’s knowledge, to date the form of no individual cell has been shown to be specified in detail in a genomic blueprint. As mentioned above, between genes and mature cell form there is a complex hierarchy of self-organization and emergent phenomena, rendering cell form profoundly epigenetic.http://bio-complexity.org/ojs/.....O-C.2013.3

This phonon/photon connection to 3-D structure would go a long way towards explaining ‘form’ in life,

An Electric Face: A Rendering Worth a Thousand Falsifications – September 2011
Excerpt: The video suggests that bioelectric signals presage the morphological development of the face. It also, in an instant, gives a peak at the phenomenal processes at work in biology. As the lead researcher said, “It’s a jaw dropper.”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VULjzX__OM

HOW BIOLOGISTS LOST SIGHT OF THE MEANING OF LIFE — AND ARE NOW STARING IT IN THE FACE – Stephen L. Talbott – May 2012
Excerpt: “If you think air traffic controllers have a tough job guiding planes into major airports or across a crowded continental airspace, consider the challenge facing a human cell trying to position its proteins”. A given cell, he notes, may make more than 10,000 different proteins, and typically contains more than a billion protein molecules at any one time. “Somehow a cell must get all its proteins to their correct destinations — and equally important, keep these molecules out of the wrong places”. And further: “It’s almost as if every mRNA [an intermediate between a gene and a corresponding protein] coming out of the nucleus knows where it’s going” (Travis 2011),,,
Further, the billion protein molecules in a cell are virtually all capable of interacting with each other to one degree or another; they are subject to getting misfolded or “all balled up with one another”; they are critically modified through the attachment or detachment of molecular subunits, often in rapid order and with immediate implications for changing function; they can wind up inside large-capacity “transport vehicles” headed in any number of directions; they can be sidetracked by diverse processes of degradation and recycling… and so on without end. Yet the coherence of the whole is maintained.
The question is indeed, then, “How does the organism meaningfully dispose of all its molecules, getting them to the right places and into the right interactions?”
The same sort of question can be asked of cells, for example in the growing embryo, where literal streams of cells are flowing to their appointed places, differentiating themselves into different types as they go, and adjusting themselves to all sorts of unpredictable perturbations — even to the degree of responding appropriately when a lab technician excises a clump of them from one location in a young embryo and puts them in another, where they may proceed to adapt themselves in an entirely different and proper way to the new environment. It is hard to quibble with the immediate impression that form (which is more idea-like than thing-like) is primary, and the material particulars subsidiary.http://www.netfuture.org/2012/May1012_184.html#2

Verse and Music:

Psalm 139:14
I will praise Thee, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; marvelous are Thy works, and that my soul knoweth right well.